Call for Papers: Orality and Literacy in the Ancient World

Calls for Papers

Submitted by Erik Shell on Wednesday, February 7, 2018 - 10:41am

Orality and Literacy in the Ancient World XIII

“Orality and Literacy: Repetition”

The Department of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin invites all classicists, historians, religious studies and biblical scholars, and scholars with an interest in oral cultures to participate in the Thirteenth Conference on Orality and Literacy in the Ancient World, to take place in Austin (TX) from Wednesday 27 March 2019 to Sunday 31 March 2019.

The conference will follow the same format as the previous conferences, held in Hobart (1994), Durban (1996), Wellington (1998), Columbia, Missouri (2000), Melbourne (2002), Winnipeg (2004), Auckland (2006), Nijmegen (2008), Canberra (2010), Ann Arbor (2012), Atlanta (2014), and Lausanne (2016). It is planned that the refereed proceedings once again be published by E.J. Brill as Volume 13 in the “Orality and Literacy in the Ancient World” series.

Location: The University of Texas at Austin

Dates: Wednesday 27 March (registration that evening) to Sunday 31 March 2019

Theme: Repetition

Keynote: Professor Ruth Scodel (Classics, University of Michigan)

The theme for the conference is “Repetition”, and papers in response to this theme are invited on topics related to the ancient Mediterranean world or, for comparative purposes, other times, places, and cultures. Also welcome are papers that engage with the transition from an oral to a literate society, or which consider the topic of reception.

Further details about accommodations and other conference-related activities will be circulated later.

Papers should be 30 minutes in length. Any graduate student who would prefer a 20-minute paper slot is invited to express their preference in the cover email accompanying their abstract. Anonymous abstracts of up to 350 words (not including bibliography) should be submitted as Word files by June 30, 2018. Please send abstracts to: OralityLiteracyxiii@austin.utexas.edu

M. Philippa (Forder) Goold, longtime professor of classics and department head at Mount Holyoke, died on March 29, 2017, after a short illness. She was 84.

Philippa was born in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe) in 1932. After taking degrees at both the University of Cape Town and Cambridge University—where her housemates at Newnham’s Whitstead Cottage included Sylvia Path—she returned to Salisbury in 1956 to begin teaching at the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now the University of Zimbabwe). In 1967 she came to the U.S. to join the faculty at Mount Holyoke, but left in 1973 when her husband, George P. Goold, was named Professor of Latin at University College London. When George accepted a professorship at Yale in 1977, Philippa returned to Mount Holyoke, where she continued to teach, eventually holding the chair of Professor of Classics on the Alumnae Foundation, and lead the department until her retirement in 1996.

The ethical and political issues treated in Cicero's major philosophical writings have been a topic of lively interest in modern scholarship. With funding from the Matariki Network, from the University of Durham, and from Dartmouth College, this conference brings together an international group of scholars who are actively working on Cicero's ethical and political thought.

Jed Atkins

Cicero on the Justice of War

Nathan Gilbert

Cicero against Lucretius De morte

Margaret Graver

The psychology of honor in Cicero’s De Re Publica

Sean McConnell

Old Men in Cicero’s Political Philosophy

Geert Roskam

Nos in diem vivimus: Cicero’s approach in the Tusculan disputations

Malcolm Schofield

Iuris consensu revisited

Katharina Volk

Towards a Definition of Sapientia: Philosophy in Cicero's Pro Marcello

(Written by Sarah E. Cox, and shared with the SCS by Ofelia N. Salgado-Buttrey)

Theodore V. Buttrey, Jr.

29 December 1929 – 9 January 2018

Renowned educator, numismatist and classicist, Theodore V. (“Ted”) Buttrey, Jr., died on January 9, 2018, eleven days after his 88th birthday. Born in Havre, Montana, as a child he attended the Peacock Military Academy in San Antonio, Texas, where he first encountered the coins of Mexico, a life-long interest. His secondary education was at the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, after which he entered Princeton University, graduating magna cum laude in 1950 in Classics. In the summer of 1952, he participated in the inaugural Summer Seminar in Numismatics conducted by the American Numismatic Society, an experience that may well have been pivotal in setting the later course of his career. In 1953, still at Princeton, he completed his Ph.D. thesis on a numismatic subject, “Studies in the Coinage of Marc Anthony,” a chapter of which was condensed and published as “Thea Neotera on Coins of Antony and Cleopatra,” ANS Museum Notes 6 (1954), pp. 95-109. There followed a Fulbright scholarship to study in Rome.

Publications (e.g. Armitage 2017) and conferences (e.g. Kavala 2014) dedicated to the theme of Roman civil wars have been constantly on the increase in recent years. If intellectual life reflects its historical moment, then the phenomenon may be a consequence of both the disappearance of a bipolar international model and the breakdown of the twentieth-century socio-economic basis for the consensus needed for stable parliamentary government. Reflecting upon the current moment, but limited to a discussion of the Roman civil wars of 49-30 BCE, the proposed conference aims to gather scholars from around the world to discuss the breakdown in political and cognitive models that is associated with that particular moment in history. This is a discussion that can usefully be undertaken by widening the scope of investigation and focussing upon not only “minor” characters (e.g. Roucillus and Egus), but also people’s documented difficulty in distinguishing between true and false reports (e.g. Caesar’s alleged descent upon Rome with his Gallic cavalry) as they sought to determine what course to take.

Everyone is invited to celebrate the life and work of Professor Alan Cameron FBA (1938-2017) with friends, former colleagues and family on 24th March in room 348 of Senate House from 14.30 until 18.00 with a reception following.

Alan Cameron read Classics at New College, Oxford and then went on to teach Latin at the University of Glasgow before coming to London in 1964, where he was first a Lecturer and then a Reader at Bedford College and then from 1972 as Professor of Latin at Kings. In 1977 he moved to Columbia University of New York where he was Anthon Professor of Latin Literature and Language until his retirement in 2008. His books included studies of Hellenistic poetry, of circus factions in Byzantium, of Greek mythography and the magisterial Last Pagans of Rome that appeared in 2011.

A number of friends and colleagues will offer reminiscences of Alan and appreciations of his work. Among the confirmed speakers are Arianna Gullo, Gavin Kelly, Oswyn Murray, John North, Peter Wiseman and members of his family.

Looking back on the recently concluded Annual Meeting, I’m of two minds. For those who took part, I think it was a big success. Newer-format events, like Career Networking and Ancient Maker Spaces, were really lively and well attended, especially by younger members. Georgia Nugent’s presidential panel on the PhD as a launching pad for careers other than college teaching was really inspiring. And the Program Committee’s special session on “Rhetoric: Then and Now” brought our professional responsibility to be political into the spotlight in a way that I feel was both fruitful and long overdue.

The success of these events is all the more impressive because every one of them underwent major changes at the last minute when key participants simply could not make it to Boston because of the weather. Amazingly few sessions were actually cancelled. But if you couldn’t get to Boston, it wasn’t a good convention for you. I’m very sorry for those whose travel plans were thwarted, and I’m extremely grateful to all those got there in spite of the extra effort, expense, and delay that it cost. Frankly, your success in doing so probably saved the convention from being a total disaster.

(Speaking of expense, Helen Cullyer and her staff are working with those who couldn’t get in to mitigate their financial exposure. Everyone affected has now received instructions on requesting refunds.)

In the summer of 2018 (July 16-August 3), there will be an NEH Summer Seminar for pre-collegiate teachers on the topic of Roman Daily Life. This seminar is an opportunity to read Petronius and some graffiti in Latin and look at Pompeian archaeology for various topics of Roman daily life. The Petronius reading forms a central core of the seminar, and thus an intermediate level of Latin proficiency (1 year of college level Latin) is required. The seminar will be held in St. Peter, Minnesota (1 hour from Minneapolis) on the campus of Gustavus Adolphus College. The NEH pays each person $2700 to participate, which will more than cover the living and food expenses (approximately $1500) – note that each participant is responsible for their own travel expenses. The seminar has been organized by Matthew Panciera (Gustavus Adolphus College) and will be co-taught by him, Beth Severy-Hoven (Macalester), Jeremy Hartnett (Wabash), and Rebecca Benefiel (Washington and Lee).

Inscribing Death: Memorial and the Transmission of Text in the Ancient World
Yale University, February 23, 2017

Cross-culturally, spaces of the dead have been productive places for considering the inherent difficulty of transmitting traditions and texts. This nexus between text, tradition, and death is seen across a range of genres including law, treaties, and wisdom sayings. Within these genres, the efficacious and correct reception of texts and traditions as lived by actual individuals is paramount. "Inscribing Death" brings scholars together to explore the dynamic connections between textual anxiety and anxiety about death in the ancient world, including ancient Mesopotamia and the Levant, Greco-Roman Egypt, and late antique Judaism and Christianity. It will also seek to integrate ongoing interdisciplinary work with ritual theory, sociolinguistic approaches to ancient textuality, linguistic anthropology, and, more broadly, the material turn in the study of the ancient world in order to further our understanding of ancient attitudes toward the nature of transmission and the reception of traditions and texts in the spaces of the dead.